The “Pragmatic” Politics of Subtraction

Right now, tea party extremism contaminates the whole Republican brand. It’s a very interesting question whether a tea party bolt from the GOP might not just liberate the party to slide back to the political center — and liberate Republicans from identification with the Sarah Palins and the Ted Cruzes who have done so much harm to their hopes over the past three election cycles.

It is doubtful that such a mass exodus would take place, but it’s bizarre to think that this would help Republican electoral prospects. The remaining rump GOP would be completely “liberated” from the burden of winning. The current Republican coalition is not quite large enough to win presidential elections on a regular basis, but slicing off a fifth or a third of that coalition would ensure that it never wins one again. Even if it lost just 10% of its current level of support, it would be doomed to near-permanent minority status. It’s true that Republicans nominated some weak candidates in 2010 and 2012 and lost races that could have been won, but the harm done to the Republican “brand” predated those elections by many years and had nothing to do with the Palins and Cruzes. Republicans in 2008 were doomed by the Iraq war, the financial crisis, the extraordinary unpopularity of Bush, and a bad nominee of such poor judgment that he thought Palin was an acceptable running mate. For all the mistakes that Tea Partiers have made in the last few years, they weren’t the ones that drove the party into the ditch. Indeed, much of the party’s current toxicity with the public is the legacy of the last era of united Republican government. The Bush era was the political disaster from which Republicans have been recovering. Cruz isn’t helping to get the party out of the deep hole where the Bush administration put it, but driving his supporters out of the party would be even more politically self-destructive than the tactics that Cruz has been employing this year.

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21 Responses to The “Pragmatic” Politics of Subtraction

I think one possible result of a Tea Party split off from the GOP (which I do not expect) would be a realignment as Dems to the right of their party found common cause with the rump Establishment Republicans. I don’t think you’d have a permanent majority Dem politics.

Yeah for Tea party to leave, there would have to be major reorganization within the democrats too. If Democrats were having their own internal fractures right now, it would be a more plausible scenario since the entire political landscape could reorganization and new coalitions of voters could be setup. But there’s no reason to think democrats are in immediate risk of this. Consequently you’re right, Tea party bolt would cripple Republicans and Tea Party.

Governance-oriented Republicans can’t live with them … and can’t live without them …

I do agree with Andrew Burton – this split in the GOP most certainly would result in conservative Dems and moderate Republicans forming common cause on some issues and over time coalescing into something that looks a lot like Eisenhower Republicans.

Henri James notes that Dems don’t have their own internal fractures right now – this isn’t exactly true … those fractures are there … but the gulf between being a conservative Dem and marching to the Tea Party drumbeat is incredibly wide.

The fact that any Republican who moved a little to the left to compromise with a conservative Dem is a target for being primaried certainly helps maintain that gulf.

The Democratic Party has always been a coalition of sometimes competing interests. Will Roger’s famous comment that he didn’t belong to an organized political party, he was a Democrat, rings true a just about any point in the party’s history.

Today’s Republican Party most closely resembles the Federalist Party following the Hartford Convention. The diehards continued in 1816 to nominate Rufus King for president, but by then most Federalists, such as John Quincy Adams, had become Republicans (forerunners of today’s Democrats.) That large Republican Party soon developed a “National” Republican faction very compatible to the ideas of the former Federalists and a “Democratic” Republican faction that carried forward the principles of the Republican Party into the soon-to-be-called Democratic Party.

Frum just wrote a love letter to George H.W. Bush on the Daily Beast. He has clearly had it with the GOP but finds himself without a home, so he’s going to daydream about the days when there were still such things as Yankee Republicans. I’d feel bad for the guy if he wasn’t such an unreconstructed imperialist on foreign issues.

Frum likes blame the Tea Party for the ills of the Republican Party, because that is what a three-card-monty scammer does to fleece his mark: divert attention from where the real blame lies. Frum, though only a speechwriter, was part of the cabal of incompetents and war criminals who led the United States into the ditch. He has never truly apologised for the Axis of Evil speech, nor accounted for his support for one of the least conservative, most profligate, most incompetent administrations in US history. He, of course, backed the amoral Romney, and tried to justify every asinine lie with the more asinine line, “He is too intelligent to believe in X”.

DL, I ask this not to be critical, but how do you measure the harm done to the Republican party by the last era? I have seen polling that the public still does and will blame Bush for the economy, but these current Republicans have tried to distance themselves from Bush’s unpopularity.

Basically, I’m asking how can you tell the voting public still thinks of the past when they look at today’s Republicans?

I think that elected Democrats have more internal cohesion than even just a few years ago because the Blue Dogs have been hunted to nigh extinction- by Republican voters. The rightward surge in some districts made holding the office with a D after your name impossible, no matter their stances. And the adamant refusal to compromise by the Republicans has pulled away cover from the Democrats who made their bread and butter playing both sides against the middle.

I think the Blue Dogs voted in party unison on Obamacare after being insulted by not being able to work their magic with the Republicans, and wanting to create a situation where they would be needed again by the other side to broker compromise. That this didn’t happen, and some were simply voted out, actually makes things easier on the Democratic caucus on the whole, certainly the leadership. Likewise, I don’t think the Democratic Party has particularly moved left, after all the current bunch are mostly the same people standing still, just with fewer conservatives pulling them right, and if there were deals to be had they would likely make them.

A lot of Blue dog democrats were looking for cover during the health care debate by trying to work out some small bipartisan deal. The problem is the Republican parties obstruction policy during the Obama era basically amounts to political total war.

So yeah alot of Bluedogs lost their political lives over Obamacare but when the other side isn’t offering any terms or compromises what choice do even the most conservative Democrats have but to fight?

@Skipjack I think the Blue Dogs voted in party unison on Obamacare after being insulted by not being able to work their magic with the Republicans, and wanting to create a situation where they would be needed again by the other side to broker compromise.

I think the Blue Dogs voted in party unison on Obamacare because it was essentially the kind of healthcare bill that a pro-Corporate Blue Dog Dem should have supported. The bill dropped the Public Option specifically to appease the Blue Dogs.

I think that some Blue Dogs may have lost their political lives over Obamacare in 2010 … but they also bear some responsibility by getting cold feet when a second round of stimulus was clearly needed in early 2010. Had the economy been growing faster in November 2010, a lot more of them would have weathered the Tea Party storm.

It’s not a contradiction to assert that a) the Bush Administration did a great deal of damage to the GOP, and b) the current nutjobs are doing a great deal more. It isn’t either-or; or a question of who the party would be better off without.

American politics would be better off without BOTH the neo-cons and corporatists of the Bush years, and without the bigots and apocalyptic howler monkeys that make up a whole lot of the Tea Party, and seem eager to wreck the economy if the country doesn’t bend to their will.

This liberal thinks that short-term, the breakup of the GOP will be a good thing because it will keep BOTH bands out of power for a good long time. Long term, the Democrats need a loyal opposition to keep them honest–and lets be blunt, the plutocrats in this country will be tempting Democrats more and more with campaign cash, especially if the GOP no longer is a reliable electoral vehicle for big money to wield power with.

But getting adults back in the room, and the bomb-throwers back onto the political sidelines where they cannot do any more real harm–is the first step towards reforming US politics.

Balconesfault: The federal government borrowed EVERY dollar spent on the various “stimulus” measures.

The national debt was substantial when Bush Junior entered office, far bigger when he left office, and is now VASTLY bigger since Obama took office.

The interest on our national debt, big as it is, will head MUCH higher. Interest rates have been, as you know, historically low, and in fact articifically low, and they will surely be headed up, way up. Then our interest payments will double or triple even if we manage to stop borrowing and adding to the debt.

Is it your position that the federal government should have borrowed more, adding even more to the national debt? After all, that would have helped more Blue Dog Dems survive the Tea Party challenge better, right?

I don’t care whether a voter or a politician has an R or a D next to his name, and I certainly am not saying “you dumb Democrat” because you’re obviously intelligent. But don’t you think we need to stop borrowing? I’m not even saying don’t raise taxes, I’m saying at least call for raising taxes AND cutting spending if you are on the left.

“I’m not even saying don’t raise taxes, I’m saying at least call for raising taxes AND cutting spending if you are on the left.”

Of course, when Obama instituted Medicare reforms that saved money without reducing anyone’s benefits, the right screamed “Look everyone – it’s the Dems who are cutting Medicare!!!!!”. When anyone on the left suggests that maybe we should stop spending money building aircraft carriers that the Navy neither wants or needs, the right screams “Look everyone – the liberals are disarming the country!!!!” And so on.

The simple fact is that there are plenty of calls from the left for spending cuts. They just don’t happen to be the same things the right wants cut, so the right refuses to negotiate.

The Republican Party has never been more ideologically unified than it has been now. Mainstream Republicans and Tea Partiers are on the same page when it comes to pocketbook issues, their revulsion towards government, etc. A small portion of the party disagrees on topics such as same-sex marriage, but will push those concerns aside to fight against ‘big government’ (the Republican Party helped expand enormously) and ‘the tyranny from the Kenyan Socialist president Obama’ (who has preserved intact many of the programs the Republicans started these last 10+ years).

The bigger problem is Republicans running against a fictional Obama and their disagreement over tactics, tactics that has its origins from the 1990s fiasco spearheaded by Gingrich.